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Pontchartrain Park, New Orleans

Neighborhoods in New Orleans
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Pontchartrain Park is a historically registered neighborhood of the city of New Orleans. A subdistrict of the Gentilly District Area, its boundaries as defined by the City Planning Commission are: Leon C. Simon Drive to the north, the Industrial Canal to the east, Dreux Avenue to the south and Peoples Avenue to the west.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Pontchartrain Park, New Orleans (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Pontchartrain Park, New Orleans
Congress Drive, New Orleans Gentilly

Geographical coordinates (GPS) Address Nearby Places
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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 30.021944444444 ° E -90.040277777778 °
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Address

Congress Drive

Congress Drive
70126 New Orleans, Gentilly
Louisiana, United States
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Nearby Places

Camp Leroy Johnson

Camp Leroy Johnson in New Orleans, Louisiana, was located on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain in the area bounded west by Franklin Avenue, and east by Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. The camp was opened in 1942 as the New Orleans Army Air Base. The site was across the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal from the New Orleans Municipal Airport. In 1947 a formal ceremony was held at the New Orleans Port of Embarkation Personnel Center to rename the base after World War II Medal of Honor recipient Leroy Johnson. After 22 years of service the camp was closed on July 1, 1964 "for economic reasons". Johnson was a native of Caney Creek near Oakdale, Louisiana, and served as a Sergeant, U.S. Army. He died on December 15, 1944, near Limon, Leyte, Philippine Islands shortly after he threw himself on two unexploded Japanese grenades during an assault thus saving two comrades. Portions of the original property retain military function with the James H. Diamond United States Army Reserve Center located on Leroy Johnson, Drive. The original site also houses the Federal Bureau of Investigation New Orleans Field Office, a portion of the Southern University of New Orleans campus, and the University of New Orleans East Campus including the Lakefront Arena. In 1987 portions of the former camp hosted 130,000 people as part of a pastoral visit by Pope John Paul II. Camp Leroy Johnson is sometimes confused with the original New Orleans Naval Air Station which was located further to the west at the site of the current main campus of the University of New Orleans.

Danziger Bridge shootings
Danziger Bridge shootings

On the morning of September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), ostensibly responding to a call from an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians at the Danziger Bridge: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were wounded. All the victims were African-American. None were armed or had committed any crime. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. The shootings caused public anger and further eroded the community's trust in the NOPD and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina overall.The NOPD attempted to cover up the killings, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four suspects were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival. Rev. Raymond Brown, the local head of the National Action Network (NAN), described the shootings as "...a racial tragedy."On August 5, 2011, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted five NOPD officers of myriad charges related to the cover-up and deprivation of civil rights. An attorney for the U.S. Justice Department described the case as "the most significant police misconduct prosecution [in the U.S.] since the Rodney King beating case". However, the convictions were vacated on September 17, 2013, by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt due to prosecutorial misconduct, and a new trial was ordered. The Justice Department appealed the decision to vacate the convictions, but a federal appeals court agreed that a new trial was warranted.On April 20, 2016, the five former officers pleaded guilty to various charges related to the shooting, and in return received reduced sentences ranging from three to twelve years in prison. Three of the officers are white and two are African-American.